All Or Nearly All This Transit Is By
Water; And There Can, I Think, Be No Doubt But That A Few Years
Will See It Reduced By Fifty Per Cent.
In October last the
Mississippi was closed, the railways had not rolling stock
sufficient for their work, the crops of the two last years had been
excessive, and there existed the necessity of sending out the corn
before the internal navigation had been closed by frost.
The
parties who had the transit in their hands put their heads
together, and were able to demand any prices that they pleased. It
will be seen that the cost of carrying a bushel of corn from
Chicago to Buffalo, by the lakes, was within one cent of the cost
of bringing it from New York to Liverpool. These temporary causes
for high prices of transit will cease; a more perfect system of
competition between the railways and the water transit will be
organized; and the result must necessarily be both an increase of
price to the producer and a decrease of price to the consumer. It
certainly seems that the produce of cereal crops in the valleys of
the Mississippi and its tributaries increases at a faster rate than
population increases. Wheat and corn are sown by the thousand
acres in a piece. I heard of one farmer who had 10,000 acres of
corn. Thirty years ago grain and flour were sent Westward out of
the State of New York to supply the wants of those who had
immigrated into the prairies; and now we find that it will be the
destiny of those prairies to feed the universe. Chicago is the
main point of exportation Northwestward from Illinois, and at the
present time sends out from its granaries more cereal produce than
any other town in the world. The bulk of this passes, in the shape
of grain or flour, from Chicago to Buffalo, which latter place is,
as it were, a gateway leading from the lakes, or big waters, to the
canals, or small waters. I give below the amount of grain and
flour in bushels received into Buffalo for transit in the month of
October during four consecutive years: -
In 1860, from the opening to the close of navigation, 30,837,632
bushels of grain and flour passed through Buffalo. In 1861, the
amount received up to the 31st of October was 51,969,142 bushels.
As the navigation would be closed during the month of November, the
above figures may be taken as representing not quite the whole
amount transported for the year. It may be presumed the 52,000,000
of bushels, as quoted above, will swell itself to 60,000,000. I
confess that to my own mind statistical amounts do not bring home
any enduring idea. Fifty million bushels of corn and flour simply
seems to mean a great deal. It is a powerful form of superlative,
and soon vanishes away, as do other superlatives in this age of
strong words. I was at Chicago and at Buffalo in October, 1861. I
went down to the granaries and climbed up into the elevators. I
saw the wheat running in rivers from one vessel into another, and
from the railroad vans up into the huge bins on the top stores of
the warehouses - for these rivers of food run up hill as easily as
they do down. I saw the corn measured by the forty-bushel measure
with as much ease as we measure an ounce of cheese and with greater
rapidity. I ascertained that the work went on, week day and
Sunday, day and night, incessantly - rivers of wheat and rivers of
maize ever running. I saw the men bathed in corn as they
distributed it in its flow. I saw bins by the score laden with
wheat, in each of which bins there was space for a comfortable
residence. I breathed the flour and drank the flour, and felt
myself to be enveloped in a world of breadstuff. And then I
believed, understood, and brought it home to myself as a fact that
here in the corn-lands of Michigan, and amid the bluffs of
Wisconsin, and on the high table plains of Minnesota, and the
prairies of Illinois had God prepared the food for the increasing
millions of the Eastern World, as also for the coming millions of
the Western.
I do not find many minds constituted like my own, and therefore I
venture to publish the above figures. I believe them to be true in
the main; and they will show, if credited, that the increase during
the last four years has gone on with more than fabulous rapidity.
For myself, I own that those figures would have done nothing unless
I had visited the spot myself. A man can not, perhaps count up the
results of such a work by a quick glance of his eye, nor
communicate with precision to another the conviction which his own
short experience has made so strong within himself; but to himself
seeing is believing. To me it was so at Chicago and at Buffalo. I
began then to know what it was for a country to overflow with milk
and honey, to burst with its own fruits and be smothered by its own
riches. From St. Paul down the Mississippi, by the shores of
Wisconsin and Iowa; by the ports on Lake Pepin; by La Crosse, from
which one railway runs Eastward; by Prairie du Chien, the terminus
of a second; by Dunleath, Fulton, and Rock Island, from whence
three other lines run Eastward; all through that wonderful State of
Illinois, the farmer's glory; along the ports of the Great Lakes;
through Michigan, Indiana, Ohio, and further Pennsylvania, up to
Buffalo? the great gate of the Western Ceres, the loud cry was
this: "How shall we rid ourselves of our corn and wheat?" The
result has been the passage of 60,000,000 bushels of breadstuffs
through that gate in one year!
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